Forward-to-a-friend & Refer-a-friend October 17, 2008

1. Forward-to-a-friend&Refer-a-friendOctober 17, 2008

2. Part IOverview

3. A tactic of several names • Forward-to-a-friend (F2F) • Refer-a-friend (RaF) • Share with a friend (more recent)

4. What is F2F? • F2F is a tactic • F2F is used to grow the membership of opt-in e-mail lists

5. Benefits of F2F done well • Increased membership • More metrics to analyze and use to gauge the success of your communications; are people willing to tell others? • Increased conversions • A conversion is typically considered a purchase (e.g. enrolled in a CCE non-credit course or purchasing a ticket to Northrop, Weisman, etc.)

6. What F2F isn’t [easily] for • F2F isn’t suitable for opt-out lists, unless you’re running opt-in and opt-out lists in parallel • That sort of opt-in/opt-out mixture adds a burden to managing data

7. What F2F isn’t for at all • Harvesting e-mail addresses for any purpose • Adding ‘friends’ to opt-out lists, or subscribing them to opt-in lists, based on what their friends do

8. F2F vs. RaF • The idea behind F2F is that you’re forwarding the same message to a friend • RaF isn’t necessarily the same message, rather it’s a sample of a mailing from the list, not necessarily the same mailing

9. A basic outline of F2F • Send a blast • Recipients follow the link to forward-to-a-friend and arrive at a web form • Recipients enter e-mail addresses of their friends and submit the form • The friends receive a pre-selected piece of content and an invitation to subscribe • Hopefully, they subscribe

10. Why not just forward as normal? • Nothing is preventing recipients from forwarding a message they receive to others in their e-mail client • While metrics of supposed forwards can be obtained, it’s not a good measure due to the implementation (next two slides) • Links to a subscription center could be easily added to messages

11. Tracking message forwards • The U’s mass e-mail system, Lyris ListManager, can track supposed forwards • To track forwards, open tracking must be enabled • The first recorded open by a recipient is logged, including the network address the message was opened from

12. Tracking message forwards II • Subsequent opens of the same message from a different IP address are counted as forwards (and opens) • If you read a tracked message, and load images, at your desk and then again later at home, you’ve supposedly forwarded the message

13. Measuring success • At what rate do people refer friends? • At what rate do referred friends subscribe? • Are the referred friends clicking through, or even opening, messages? • Do referred friends keep their subscription after one real issue? Two? • See part IV

14. The spam problem • Abuse of referral forms and open text fields • People who are referred report the U as a spammer, not their friend

15. Part IIWhat Lyris ListManager Offers

16. Lyris does refer-a-friend • Lyris offers refer-a-friend functionality • You select a sample issue and customize it for those who are referred • There isn’t a quick way to setup a F2F link to forward the current message

17. F2F is possible • With additional time for every mailing you could mimic forward-to-a-friend • But should you? • It’s time and money • Are you getting a measurable, good increase in subscribers, engagement, ‘conversions’, etc? • ROI

18. The default referral form from Lyris No particularly interesting, not branded for the U, just functional.

19. How can the form be improved? • Brand it! • Make it appear as a part of your Web site, even though it’s not • UThink blogs are sometimes used this way • Why wouldn’t you want to drive traffic to your Web site?

20. The default referral e-mail Note the From field, the Subject field, and the lead-in message.

21. How can we improve the e-mail? • Use a good sample issue • Provide a lead-in message that explains why you’re receiving the message, in your words, and a clear option to subscribe • Repeat the subscribe option at the end of the message • Assure the recipient that you won’t use their e-mail address for other purposes • Use a Web page for subscriptions, not e-mail

22. The referred state • Lyris has member type ‘referred’ • Those who are referred are automatically added as a list member with this state • This state prevents duplication of referral invites and doesn’t include the member in other message sends • Members in this state can be automatically purged after a set period

23. Part IIIImplementing Refer-a-friend for Today’s News Headlines

24. Adding RaF to an existing pub. • We are adding refer-a-friend to Today’s News Headlines • Today’s News is a daily e-mail and Web page • http://www1.umn.edu/urelate/newsservice/todaysnews/tnarchive-2008/tn-20081014.html

25. Today’s News Headlines Web page

26. Today’s News Headlines e-mail

27. Today’s News Headlines e-mail footer

28. Today’s News Headlines subscribe form A subscription for already exists http://www1.umn.edu/urelate/newsservice/subscribe-tn.html

29. What we had to do • Make a better referral form • Provide a thank you page for referrers • Pick an issue for the sample • Update the sample content • Update our template • Test it all

30. Referral form I • The referral form is hosted on the Lyris server • We created a new referral form from the default template • Utilities->Web Forms->Referral Forms • Create From Template • Use “Referral Form Template”

31. Referral form II We gave the referral form a useful name and left the code as is.

32. Referral form III • We copied code from one of our News Service web pages and merged the referral form into it • Links to other page, image references, CSS references, etc. needed updating due to the different host • Tweaks to Lyris default code for better adherence to the doctype • Stripped out Google Analytics code

33. Thank you page We added a very basic thank you/confirmation page to the site.

34. Sample content • We picked our sample issue and made a copy of the content • We created a sample invitation from the built-in invitation template to get at the code (switch to built-in templates while in View Templates to get to this) • We updated the sample issue using code from the default invitation to get at the code to use for the From and Subject lines, and any message the referrer provided • We added the option to subscribe using the web form near the top and bottom of the message, and some text • We removed the option to unsubscribe

35. Invitation/sample content headers

36. Invitation/sample content HTML version

37. Updating the standard template • Our current recipients need to find the option to refer-a-friend somewhere • We added this to the footer in the HTML and text parts • Q: Do we make the refer-a-friend option more pronounced for one or several issues, rather than just burying it in the footer?

38. Testing the implementation • We want to test using the actual list, but don’t want a random recipient since we need to test the “send me a copy” and don’t want to copy a random list member • We created a segment to select just the tester

39. And now we walk through it

40. Part IVMetrics, Analysis, and More

41. Sorry, this is for next month • Some real metrics and whatever we can dig up from others • Clarifications on best practices? • Better implementations?